About Hunan Entertainment Channel

Hunan Entertainment Channel

Hunan Entertainment Channel is a terrestrial entertainment channel of Hunan Broadcasting System (HBS), based in Changsha, Hunan, China. Listed in HBS's channel family as its "Show" or entertainment service, it broadcasts mainly in Mandarin across Hunan province and is distinct from the group's national flagship, Hunan Satellite TV. Yet its importance in Chinese television history is out of proportion to its provincial reach: this is the channel that invented Super Boy and first staged Super Girl, the talent-show formats that transformed Chinese entertainment television in the 2000s, and a channel that in later years reinvented itself as the base of Mango MCN, one of Chinese broadcasting's most closely watched media-convergence experiments.

Origins and early identity

Channel listings date the service to 1 July 1987. In its earlier lives it was known successively as Hunan Arts Television, as the second programme service of Hunan Television, and as the Hunan Television Culture and Sports Channel — the "Wenti" channel, combining culture and sport. It broadcast from Hunan Television's old headquarters on Deya Road in Changsha's Kaifu District, and later also from the Golden Eagle Film and Television Culture City, the HBS production base. As a ground channel it served Hunan province only, one of a family of provincial services — news, economic, city, drama and film channels — beneath the satellite flagship. By the late 1990s, however, the Culture and Sports Channel was in difficulty: its advertising income was low and its operation was in trouble.

The Zhang Huali turnaround

The channel's fortunes turned on the arrival of Zhang Huali, a former television news journalist who had created Focus, described as mainland China's first in-depth news programme, in 1989. Transferred to the Culture and Sports Channel as its first deputy director in December 1998 and promoted to chief supervisor in 2001, Zhang confronted a channel with weak revenue and a remit — sport — for which Hunan had few resources. In 2002 he therefore changed the channel's positioning entirely: sport gave way to entertainment, the channel was comprehensively reformed around a younger production team, and a new slate of programmes was launched, including the variety show Happy Mango, the entertainment news programme Entertainment Vanguard and the singing contest Super Boy. Zhang's 2003 weather and lifestyle information programme Star Weather showed the risks of the new populism: it drew controversy over vulgar content, he and the channel's leadership made three trips to Beijing to deliver self-criticisms, and the programme was taken off air seventeen days after its launch. The episode did not stop the entertainment strategy, which was about to produce the channel's defining achievement.

Super Boy: the format that started it all

In 2003 the channel set out to create a male counterpart to its Xingjie (Miss Star) beauty election, which was open only to women. The result began as the "Hunan Mass Song Gala — Love Song Prince Selection"; when the "Love Song Prince" name itself attracted controversy, the contest was renamed Super Boy (Chaoji Nansheng). The 2003 edition was held only within Hunan and was won by He Donglin, and its competition system, format and emblem were closely similar to those later used by its famous sister contest. A 2004 edition widened the auditions to Changsha, Changchun, Jinan and Zhengzhou and was broadcast jointly with Henan Television, producing winners Yu Mingxuan, Xu Yang and the group A-One. Super Boy itself achieved only limited impact — but the channel then applied its format, almost move for move, to a female contest.

Super Girl and the channel's place in television history

That contest was Super Girl (Chaoji Nüsheng). Staged by the entertainment channel in Hunan in 2004 on the Super Boy template, it succeeded immediately in the province; the contest was then taken up by Hunan Satellite TV together with media partners in other cities, with the entertainment channel continuing to run the Hunan region, and became a national phenomenon that reshaped Chinese popular culture and made Zhang Huali's reputation as the "father of Super Girl". When the male contest returned on the national satellite channel in 2007 it did so under a new name, Happy Boy (Kuaile Nansheng), completing the transfer of the channel's invention to the flagship. Few provincial ground channels anywhere in China can claim to have originated a format with that reach; the entertainment channel's experiment of 2003–2004 is the foundation on which Hunan TV's national entertainment empire was built.

Programming on the provincial channel

Within Hunan, the channel settled into its role as the province's entertainment service. Its long-running entertainment news programme Entertainment Vanguard remained a fixture of the schedule, listed among its current programmes alongside the game and activity formats 321 Get Moving and I'm the Big Winner, the knowledge programme Zhishu Dali, the family programme Happy Flowers Bloom, and the Xingjie election, held annually in the fourth quarter. Its ended programmes illustrate its breadth over the years: the dating show Marry Me, the women's programmes Good Woman and the VV Women's Club, the cookery format Single Kitchen (later Love Kitchen), the workplace talent show Workplace Star, the investigation show Curiosity Survey, the couples' format Perfect Partner and the home programme Mango Super Home. Some of its productions travelled beyond the province: during the early period of HBS's 2010 partnership with Qinghai Television, several entertainment channel programmes were briefly trialled on satellite, and a 2012 edition of its people's Spring Festival gala was produced with partners and shared with channels in Fujian, Hebei, Heilongjiang and Liaoning.

From television channel to MCN pioneer

The channel's second reinvention began in 2018. In July that year, in line with the asset restructuring of the HBS shopping and media companies, it spun off its integrated operating company, Mango Entertainment, to operate independently, retaining the traditional television business itself. In October 2018 the channel formally entered short video, incubating an MCN (multi-channel network) business called Drama TV and establishing a presence across the major platforms — Douyin, Kuaishou, Weishi, Toutiao, Baijiahao and Taobao Live — with content tracks in parenting, beauty, food, entertainment and vertical-screen drama. By the end of August 2019 Drama TV's following on Douyin and Kuaishou alone exceeded ninety million, its most-watched single short video had been played more than eighty million times, and it had signed more than one hundred and twenty short-video creators, building several leading vertical accounts. On 6 May 2019 the channel established a new integrated operating company, Hunan Innovative Entertainment Media, unveiled at its anniversary gala on 28 June 2019, and from the third quarter of 2019 it began a deliberate transformation into a comprehensive MCN institution, initiating a national alliance of broadcasting MCNs on 29 September 2019.

Mango MCN

By September 2020 the channel reported that the MCN operation had formed a fairly complete industrial chain, that its new-media income had overtaken its traditional television advertising business, and that it had won multiple industry awards. On 16 December 2020 the National Radio and Television Administration selected the Hunan Entertainment MCN model as a national typical case of broadcast media convergence for 2020. In January 2021 the brand was upgraded and renamed Mango MCN, and in October 2021 it launched a self-developed platform, Wancan, intended to help build and connect MCN businesses. Mango MCN's operations came to comprise four principal lines — Drama TV for short-video media, Show TV for live-streaming e-commerce, Mango Engine for content e-commerce and New 4 for brand marketing — alongside programme production, entertainment marketing accounts and Fulan TV, the unit responsible for the channel's own television programmes and local-life content in Hunan.

Place in the Hunan Broadcasting System

The channel is part of Hunan Broadcasting System, the Hunan provincial state broadcaster, China's second-biggest television network after China Media Group, whose services also include Hunan TV, the Economic, City, Drama and Movie channels, Golden Eagle Cartoon, Golden Eagle Documentary and the international channel, together with the Mango TV platform. In English-language listings of the HBS portfolio it appears simply as the entertainment ("Show") channel, in standard and high definition. Its headquarters remain split between the old Hunan Television site on Deya Road and the main building of the Golden Eagle Film and Television Culture City — a fitting geography for a channel that bridges Hunan television's older provincial world and its newer digital one.

Significance

Hunan Entertainment Channel matters twice over in the history of Chinese media. As a broadcaster, it was the laboratory of the Hunan entertainment revolution: the struggling culture and sports service that, under Zhang Huali after 2002, gambled on youth entertainment and produced Super Boy and Super Girl, the formats that carried its parent network to national dominance. As a company, it became a test case for the survival strategy of Chinese terrestrial television, converting a provincial channel's production skills into a short-video and e-commerce MCN whose revenues surpassed its own television advertising and whose model the national regulator held up as an example of media convergence. From satellite-era talent shows to the short-video economy, the channel's history is a compressed account of how Chinese entertainment media reinvented itself twice in a generation.